The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Raymond Kurzweil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been over six months since December 15 when Google hired Ray Kurzweil as its director of engineering -- but today, that hire is drawing huge attention thanks to a 2006 book he wrote about digital immortality.

Kurzweil is both a successful entrepreneur and a maker of bold statements about the future. While it's easier to see why Kurzweil would join Google, I am wondering what Google was thinking when it hired Kurzweil.

Kurzweil is in the news for his comments on June 16 at the second Global Futures 2045 conference. In case you missed it, 32-year-old Russian tech entrepreneur, Dmitry Itskov, sponsors the conference -- having set 2045 as the year that human kind will be able to keep your brain alive in a robot surrogate and upload its contents to a computer, according to CNN.

Kurzweil probably inspired Itsikov with his 2006 book, The Singularity is Near. Among his predictions in that book, "In the 2040s, humans will develop the means to instantly create new portions of ourselves, either biological or nonbiologicial [so that people can have] a biological body at one time and not at another, then have it again, then change it.”

At Global Futures 2045, Kurzweil made a similar prediction. "Somewhere between 10 and 20 years [from now], there is going to be tremendous transformation of health and medicine. By treating biology as software and reprogramming cells to treat diseases and other ailments, humans have already made tremendous progress in medicine. These will be 1,000 times more powerful by the end of the decade. And a million times more powerful in 20 years."

64-year-old Kuzweil became famous in the 1970s for inventing text-to-speech software that enabled blind people -- Stevie Wonder was featured in its ads -- to read. He has also been first to market with "the CCD flat-bed scanner and omni-front optical character recognition," according to NBC News.

For Kurzweil, this is about personal immortality. He wants his “Body 1.0" to live long enough so that his brain can be preserved in a robot surrogate and he can "upload his brain into a computer and fly around the world as a swarm of nanobots," according to bgr.

In a statement from last December, Kurzweil said he was joining Google because of its futuristic bent. As ZDNet reported, Kurzweil's "interest in reading technology, artificial intelligence, driving cars and those other things from the Jetsons lines up nicely with Google's efforts."

And BusinessInsider reports that his current role at Google is to help its search technology "understand natural language."

But in December, ZDNet speculated that Kurzweil could bring buzz to Google: "Kurzweil gives Google some science fiction becomes reality cred. The buzz is hard to measure, but it's certainly not a bad perk for the company."

I am not counting on being digitally immortal by 2045 -- but ZDNet was spot on when it comes to its prediction about Kurzweil's boost to Google's buzz-o-meter.